So, Holli grad­u­ated. After years of hard work and stress, she was finally able to accept her diploma AND to give a speech. When she heard that she was cho­sen to give a speech at grad­u­a­tion, we sorta joked that I was more of a writer, and that we could do what the Pres­i­dent does on West Wing.

It was entic­ing, and then we thought, “Why not?” So, she gave me some ideas that she had, and she passed on pre­vi­ous speeches. She wanted a rough draft in a cou­ple days. I toiled away at it, men­tally. I finally, at 1am one morn­ing, got some­thing down on dig­i­tal paper. It was a speech that, moments after I wrote it, I was proud of. The next morn­ing I wasn’t.

Holli’s remarks made it clear that an almost com­plete rewrite was in order. My nick­name of Miles “One-Draft” Rausch was dan­ger­ously close to being a sham. We were in Jersey’s, and I finally set to ask­ing her ques­tions that could help me get inside her mind. She wanted it to be mostly solemn with some com­edy. She wanted to touch on cer­tain top­ics. She def­i­nitely wanted no “Yo’ Mama” jokes, a pil­lar of the first speech.

So, with her encour­age­ment and ideas, I set to writ­ing again. I liked the gen­eral theme of “pay­ing atten­tion”, but it was really Holli’s ideas that I needed to express, not my own. This draft I got right. She made some addi­tional changes to it and got to prac­tic­ing it. But that wasn’t it. We made the deci­sion to “fake out” the blog­ging masses. We decided that we’d both post fake speeches on the day of the speech, and I would post a video of the real speech later on. Holli posted the first draft, while I penned an entirely new ver­sion of the speech. It was a ver­sion that I knew Holli would have been hor­ri­fied to give.

I did even­tu­ally post the actual speech, in video form. In ret­ro­spect, I should have titled it “The Grad­u­a­tion Speech” not “The Graduation”.

It was an inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence help­ing to write a speech for another per­son to give. You have to keep a lot of things in mind, includ­ing their sense of humor, their read­ing style, back­ground, vocab­u­lary, and per­sonal experience.

P.S. Job search is still on. I’ll keep you updated.